Old
guys only think about sex a
couple of times a day, leaving
us more than 28,000 additional
seconds per day to concentrate
on the enemy. Young
guys haven't lived long enough to be cranky, and a cranky soldier is a dangerous
soldier. If we can't kill the enemy we'll complain them into submission.
"My
back hurts!" "I'm hungry!" "Where's
the remote control?" An
18-year-old hasn't had a legal beer yet and you shouldn't go to war until you're
at least old enough to legally drink. An average old guy, on the other hand, has
consumed 126,000 gallons of beer by the time he's 35 and a jaunt through the
desert heat with a backpack and M-60 would
do wonders for the old beer belly. An
18-year-old doesn't like to get up before 10
a.m.

Old
guys get up early every morning to pee. If
old guys are captured we couldn't spill the beans because
we'd
probably forget where we put them. In fact, name, rank, and serial number would
be a real brainteaser. Boot
camp would actually be easier for old guys.We're
used to getting screamed and
yelled at

and
we actually like soft food. We've
also developed a deep appreciation for guns and
rifles.

We
like them almost better than naps. They
could lighten up on the obstacle
course however. I've
been in combat and I
didn't see a single 20-foot wall with
rope hanging over the side, nor
did I ever do any pushups after
completing basic training. I
can hear the Drill Sergeant now, "Get
down and give me...er...one." And
the running part is
kind of a waste of energy. I've
never seen anyone outrun a bullet. An
18-year-old has the whole world ahead of him. He's
still learning to shave, to
actually carry on a conversation, and to wear pants without the top of his butt
crack showing and his boxer shorts sticking out.
He's
still hasn't figured out that a
pierced tongue catches food particles, and that a 400-watt speaker in the back
seat of a Honda Accord can rupture an eardrum. All
great reasons to keep our sons at home to learn a little more about life before
sending them off to possible death. Let
us old guys track down those dirty
rotten cowards who attacked our hearts on September 11. The last thing the enemy
would want to see right now is a couple of million old farts with attitudes.
Share
this with your senior friends (It's
purposely in big type for us old guys)

Draft the Boys at Sixty-Five

Clarence Jordan

As a new generationfaces the prospect of serving
overseas, Clarence Jordan's tongue-in-cheek essay on the military draft has
gained a currency that is hard to ignore.

There's a lot of talk going on today about how we don't need
peacetime conscription in a nation like this. But we might as well just face up
to the fact that we've got to have the draft. In the first place, we've gotten
too civilized to go to war voluntarily. We've just got to be made to fight. And
then, automation has taken all the sport out of killing. Time was when an honest
man could go to battle against an honest man, and there was a lot of sport in
that; there was a lot of fun, a lot of challenge. You don't have to be drafted
for that kind of sport. But who wants to operate a computer to kill scads of
women and children? We're just not going to war and do that kind of thing unless
we're drafted.

Look at it this way—a very peace-loving nation like ours has the
responsibility to keep the peace, all over the world, even if we have to do it
by ourselves. And even if we have to kill off everybody else in the world to
keep the peace in the world. We got to do it. It's our responsibility. Peace is
that important—we've got to have it. The trouble is, some people think you can
have it without plenty of guns and planes and napalm and bombs and men. Well,
you can't. You've got to have these things. And when too many folks get to
arguing about this, the only thing you can do with folks who are arguing is just
draft them.

Without the draft, there'd be entirely too much talk about
peace and too little real fighting for peace. So until people quit thinking and
talking, we're gonna have to have the draft, that's it. Now, I admit we
might have to occasionally make a few changes in the draft law. For instance, at
the present, we're drafting kids from eighteen to twenty-six. We shouldn't be
drafting those kids. They're too young; they're too flighty; they're too sexy;
they're too immature. They're not even represented in Congress. They don't have
any say-so about this decision. Besides, those kids need to stay at home and get
married and get into their vocation and start raising a family and all those
kinds of things. Then too when you send these kids off, you got to have such a
long veterans' program. They come back veterans eighteen, nineteen years old,
you know. You gotta keep 'em on the rolls for another forty to sixty years.

Now, it could be that we could draft middle-aged folks, but, you know,
they're too productive. We got to have them to make the bombs and the planes and
the napalm, without which there can be no peace. We need them to run our big
banks and our big corporations, to keep the economy booming. We gotta keep ‘em
in Congress, to pass draft laws and tax laws and laws against draft-card burning
and all like that. We got to keep these middle-aged folks at home, to make
committees in Congress, to investigate people who ain't peace loving. And then
we got to keep ‘em at home to teach their sons the glory and the beauty of
killing off men, women, and children that they've never seen before. We can't
have peace in the world without our middle-aged folks staying at home.

Well, that only leaves our senior citizens, but they're
too—well, now wait a minute, what about our senior citizens? Yea, what about our
senior citizens? How about starting the draft at sixty-five? Looky here, at that
age they're getting ready to retire and they could go at their own expense. We
wouldn't have to pay ‘em—they're on Social Security, and old-age security, and
all like that. They're on their pensions….

And then another thing, and I
noticed this, that the older a man gets, the more belligerent he gets. You
listen to these guys talk in Congress. There isn't anybody who's more anxious to
give the Communists hell than a man who's too old to deliver it. Now anybody
that's as anxious to deliver some loads to the nether regions as our senior
citizens ought not to be denied the privilege of delivering them in person. They
wouldn't even have to be drafted to do it. If given the opportunity,
they'd volunteer in droves.

And too, by the time a man reaches sixty-five and had to be drafted, he
usually wouldn't leave at home a sweetheart or somebody like that weeping for
him. This would definitely cut down on hasty marriages. And when he was given
his two-week leave before being shipped abroad, his wife probably wouldn't get
pregnant, and that would cut down on the war boom of babies and help the
population explosion.

But I think his wife ought to be drafted too. We ought to
draft them all—men and women that are sixty-five years old—so she could go along
with him to do his cooking and cleaning and see that he comes home at night like
a good soldier should. With their wives along, these elderly GI's would not be
liable to turn these foreign cities into brothels and burden its citizenry with
illegitimacy.

It's also obvious from the traffic on our toll roads that senior citizens
love to travel. You get on Interstate 75, and you see one camper trailer after
another going up and down, going to Florida. Most of our senior citizens, by the
time they're sixty-five, have seen practically every tourist place in the United
States. Let's give 'em a chance to see the rest of the world. All we'd have to
do with this new army would be to equip 'em with a camper trailer and let 'em
get on the road. Now you would have to have in these foreign countries adequate
tourist places with adequate rest stops and so forth. This might be a real nasty
problem in backward countries with outdoor privies. But we might be able to even
get around that. This army would be highly mobile with their camper trailers.
Perhaps they could be even more mobile than in helicopters, and we could do away
with the expensive helicopters.

Now I think the uniforms for this new army should be usual tourist
shorts—both the men and the women should be equipped with the usual shorts that
these senior citizens wear when they are touring the country. Now the reason I
prescribe shorts is that if you were to get all of our senior citizens with
their knobby knees and their varicose veins descending on a country, the
psychological effect on that country would be such that they would capitulate
immediately.

This army would have other psychological advantages also.
Practically all of the elderly GI's would be grandparents, with the standard
ailments and aches and pains. It's doubtful that any enemy, no matter how fierce
or determined he might be, could long resist a vast invasion of grandparents
talking about their grandchildren and their aches and pains. No tonnage of bombs
could produce a greater stampede to the conference table.

Now the morale of this army would just be superb. It would be boundless,
because when a man's sixty-five years old he's had forty, fifty years to reflect
on the bliss of private enterprise and the gross evil of Communism, and without
hesitation, he would be so committed to his superlative ideals that he would
gladly and eagerly spill his iron-poor blood. Who would want to fade away in
boredom at a retirement center, when he can go down in a burst of glory for his
superlative ideals on a foreign shuffleboard court?

Another boost to morale would be that some of the troops
would be the directors and chairmen of the boards of huge corporations with war
contracts. Given the opportunity to execute the wars that they helped plan, and
that have made them rich, their zeal would just be boundless. Well may it be
said of these rich men who plan the wars, “His strength is as the strength of
ten, because his heart's corrupt.”

But to provide the greatest morale stimulus, the law to draft at sixty-five
would have to allow for some exceptions. For instance, the president as
commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy, even though he may not yet be
sixty-five, should not be denied the privilege of volunteering, donning his
shorts, and leading his shorted army in this great expeditionary force. We
should give the commander-in-chief the privilege of accompanying this senior
army.

In the next place, I think we should make exceptions for the Armed Services
Committee, and also for the House Appropriations Committee. If you're going to
make laws for appropriations and all like that, certainly you need some field
experience. And these men, even though not sixty-five, should be given the
privilege of joining the army.

Now, let's consider some more of the economic aspects of the draft at
sixty-five. The first big thing I see would be in the cost of recruitment. You
wouldn't need but two recruitment centers for these elderly GI's –one in Florida
and one on California. And you wouldn't have to have any pre-induction
physicals, in view of the fact of universal disability. Now there might be one
or two physically fit men, but the number of fit would be so small that you
could just go ahead and dispense entirely with the examinations and conscript
them all. It could be too that there would be a tremendous savings to Medicare,
provided we could have rather high casualties, because most of these guys are
just beginning Medicare and if we could arrange to have a casualty rate pretty
high, think of the savings it would be to that program.

Another thing is that by drafting only those over sixty-five, we could almost
eliminate the enormously expensive Veterans Administration. A maimed man of this
age would hardly consider it worth the effort to learn how to use artificial
arms and legs. Nor would he likely want to go to college, or to buy a
twenty-year house on a forty-year mortgage. Even his meager needs wouldn't last
too long, and because the crop of veterans would disappear so rapidly, we could
afford to have twice as many of 'em. And by raising the draft age to sixty-five,
we could completely bypass the astronomically extravagant training centers and
camps. When a man's that old, he's just about as trained as he's gonna get. The
government not only would be spared the considerable expense of training him,
but would profit immensely from his long years of experience. Overnight, we
would have, not a band of immature amateurs, but an army of decrepit
professionals.

Besides the savings in money, though, there would be the
greater savings in manpower. For instance, when you kill a man off at eighteen,
nineteen, twenty years old, you're killing off a guy that's got twenty, thirty,
forty, fifty years of productive life left in him. Now these folks that make
automobiles up here in Detroit, they wouldn't catch an automobile right off the
assembly line and junk it. They would expect to get some mileage out of it. You
wouldn't take a kid right out of college and junk him on the battlefield. You
want to get some mileage out of him.

Now, another thing is that when you kill off a boy that's maybe eighteen,
nineteen years old, you don't know but that maybe you're killing a future
Einstein, or a future Abraham Lincoln, or a future George Washington. You don't
know, you might be killing some great genius of some kind. But when you kill off
a guy sixty-five years old, you know what you're killing.

There's one final thing that might be said. This army would
really have no equal in the art of pacification. Its ranks would be filled up
with retired bankers and insurance company executives. They could completely
rebuild the crude economic structure of a foreign country. The elderly newspaper
and radio editors and managers could supply a whole lot of American intellectual
trash for the foreign people. The enlisted personnel who in private life were
captains of American industry could have a whole foreign country on cigarettes
and wheels in no time at all. And these are the foundation of any civilization.
The conscripted politicians could teach the foreign hopefuls all the ins and
outs of, well, you know, under-the-table deals and how to conduct a successful
candidacy and all like that. In a matter of weeks, after storming the beaches,
all these mighty architects of the American dream, these wrinkled but wise GI's,
would transform alien lands into prosperous territories begging for statehood.
With prospects of such affluent bliss, most countries would actually invite us
to invade them. And we've never needed any pretext other than an invitation from
a corrupt regime.

But if this calls for more senior citizens than we could
supply, it might be necessary to have a war waiting list. Some countries that
are fairly well off might just have to be told plainly that we wouldn't invade
'em under any circumstances. So the only thing then that stands between us and
world peace and plenty is one little minor change in the draft
law.

Clarence Jordan (1912-1969) founded
Koinonia, an interracial farming cooperative in Americus, Georgia, in
1942. A Bible scholar, he is the authorThe Cottonpatch
Gospel, a translation of the New Testament from Greek into
colloquial southern English.